---
title: Welcome to ParadeDB
---

## What is ParadeDB?

ParadeDB is an Elasticsearch alternative built on Postgres. We're modernizing the features of Elasticsearch,
starting with real-time search and analytics.

ParadeDB is not a fork of Postgres, but regular Postgres with custom extensions installed. ParadeDB itself
ships with Postgres 16.

## Why ParadeDB

Today, Postgres users that need a search and analytics engine face two options: adopt an external service like
Elasticsearch, which is powerful but painful to run, tune, and sync, or use Postgres’ native search and
aggregations, which lack critical functionality and perform poorly over large datasets.

ParadeDB aims to be the best of both worlds, providing developers with the familiarity of Postgres and the
performance of a dedicated search and analytical database.

ParadeDB is a good fit for:

- Developers who trust Postgres and don't want to operate a non-Postgres database/query engine
- Full-text, similarity, or hybrid search over large volumes of operational data
- Backends that are bottlenecked by Postgres' analytical performance over hundreds of millions or billions of rows
- Latency-sensitive analytical queries over external object stores like S3 and table formats like Delta Lake

## Get Started

The fastest way to create an instance is by pulling the ParadeDB docker image and running it locally.

```bash
docker run \
  --name paradedb \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=<user> \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<password> \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=<dbname> \
  -v paradedb_data:/var/lib/postgresql/ \
  -p 5432:5432 \
  -d \
  paradedb/paradedb:latest
```

You may set `user`, `password`, and `dbname` to whatever values you want — these will be your database
connection credentials. By default, this will start a ParadeDB instance at `http://localhost:5432`.

To connect to ParadeDB, install a Postgres client like `psql` and run

```bash
psql -h <hostname> -U <user> -d <dbname> -p <port> -W
```

## Next Steps

You're now ready to jump into our search or analytics quickstart guides.

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Search" icon="magnifying-glass" href="/search/quickstart">
    Quickstart for full text and hybrid search.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Analytics" icon="chart-column" href="/analytics/quickstart">
    Quickstart for accelerated analytical queries.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>
